5 Things More Likely to Happen Than Winning Friday's Mega Millions

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A woman buys Mega Millions lottery tickets at a newsstand Thursday, Dec. 12, 2013, in Philadelphia. Mega Millions, the lesser known lottery game alongside Powerball, is stepping up to the plate with an estimated $425 million jackpot for Friday's drawing, an amount that comes less than two months after a major game revamp that is supposed to create bigger jackpots and open potential players' wallets. The jackpot is the fifth largest ever in U.S. history and the second largest in Mega Millions history, trailing behind the $656 million Mega Millions jackpot in 2012. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Updated at 3:38 PM EST on Monday, Dec 23, 2013

The Mega Millions jackpot is the second-largest ever at $425 million, which could make someone extra lucky on Friday the 13th. The bad news: you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than taking home Friday's winnings.

You also have a better chance of contracting West Nile Virus and being murdered than winning the Mega Millions jackpot.

Recent changes in the game have lowered the odds of winning, which means the pot is rolling over for increasingly bigger jackpots. The odds of winning the jackpot used to be 1 in 176 million, but those odds have changed to 1 in 259 million, thanks to changes in October that included picking six numbers from 1 to 75 instead of the previous 1 to 56. There hasn't been a single winner since Mega Millions changed the game.

Here are other events more likely to occur than you rolling in the dough:

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Being murdered: You have a 1 in 18,989 chance of getting murdered, according to DiscovertheOdds.com, which curated data from the Centers for Disease Control.

Finding E.T.: Scientists say that one in five of the Sun-like stars in the Milky Way have habitable planets. That means 8.8 billion planets could be home to other life forms.

Toeing the poverty line: The odds of being poor in the U.S. are 1 in 6. That's 49.7 million people in the U.S. living in poverty, which the Census Bureau defines as an income less than $23,283 for a family of four.

Getting West Nile Virus: The odds of contracting the deadly disease is 1 in 66,592. The odds of dying from it are 1 in 1.4 million.

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Being struck by lightning: Perhaps one of the most well-known statistics out there, the odds of getting struck by lightning in a given year are still 1 in a million, according to DiscovertheOdds.com. The odds could change depending on "cloud-to-ground lightning density rates, population size, indoor vs. outdoor activity setting and safety adherence," according to the website. The odds of getting struck by lightning in a lifetime, given that you live to about 80 years old, are about 1 in 3,000, according to statistics from the University of Illinois in Chicago.